• Welcome, to a statistics presentation on the Ultimate Fight Championship (UFC).
• The UFC is a renowned Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fight promoter that tries to answer the question:
• Which fighting style is best when you strip away the rules that separate different martial arts?

• In this presentation, we will answer the question that’s asked by a lot of MMA fans: Striking or Grappling?
• We will take a look to see if a striker or a grappler has a better chance of winning
• To do this, we’ll be using a comprehensive dataset available from Kaggle UFC Data on Kaggle.

• All fights start standing and all fights end on the ground
• All UFC Champions excel in both striking and grappling
• One fighter, however, was so dominant that it would formulate the hypothesis of this presentation
• Khabib Nurmagomedov is a former Lightweight Champion with an undefeated streak
• He never bled in the sport, and his grappling is the best in the history of the UFC. He WILL take you down

\[ H_0: \text{Better Grappling} = \text{ Takedowns} = \text{ Wins } \]

• Here we can see the striking performance of the UFC, if you wish to see matches with high strike attempts and high percentage on strikes landed, look to the far right

striking_plot <- 
  plot_ly(data = combined_data, 
          x = ~Significant_Strikes_Attempted, 
          y = ~Significant_Strikes_Landed / Significant_Strikes_Attempted,
          marker = list(color = "blue"),
          text = ~Fighter, ids = ~Fighter, 
          type = "scatter", mode = "markers") %>%
  layout(
    title = "Striking Performance in UFC",
    xaxis = list(title = "Strikes Attempted"),
    yaxis = list(title = "Strikes Percentage"),
    showlegend = FALSE
  )

• Here we can see the grappling performance of the UFC, if you wish to see matches with high takedown attempts and high percentage on takedowns landed, look to the far right

## Warning: Ignoring 42 observations

• Let \(W\) be the number of wins by the fighter.
• Let \(L\) be the number of losses by the fighter.
• Then, the win percentage (\(P_{\text{win}}\)) can be calculated as:

\[ P_{\text{win}} = \frac{W}{W + L} \]

• It’s the ratio of wins to the total number of fights (wins plus losses).

• All fights start standing up

• We will take a look at the correlation between strikes attempted, strikes percentage, and compare this to win percentage

• Here we have the strike percentage calculated

• Let \(SA\) be significant strikes attempted

• Let \(SL\) be significant strikes landed

• Then significant strike percentage be (\(S_{\text{%}}\)): \[ S_{\text{%}} = \frac{SL}{SA} \]

• All fights end up on the ground

• We will take a look at the correlation between takedowns, takedown percentage, and compare this to win percentage

• Here we have the takedown percentage calculated

• Let \(TL\) be takedowns landed

• Let \(TA\) be takedowns attempted

• Then, the takedown percentage (\(TD_{\%}\)) can be calculated as: \[ TD_{\%} = \frac{TL}{TA} \]

• It seems that simply attempting a strike or a takedown isn’t enough to guarantee a win
• We can see in the higher a percentage for an attack, whether strike or takedown, the higher the chance of winning

• We can see from the data that it doesn’t matter if you’re primarily a grappler or striker
• It doesn’t matter if you have the world’s fanciest kick or the world’s fastest takedown
• What gurantees a win, in the end, is the strike that lands, the takedown that actually takes the opponent down

\[ H_A: \text{Better Fighting} = \text{ More attempts landing} = \text{ Wins } \]